This thread is for discussing end-of-life directives and the implications (moral, legal, ethical, etc) surrounding them.
As a starting topic,
In Texas, a pregnant woman was found unconscious in her home. She was taken to a hospital, physically revived and put on life support. The fetus is showing signs of activity. However, she was declared brain dead, which is considered legally dead and medically dead. Against her proclaimed wishes and those of her next-of-kin (husband) and her parents, she remains on life support due to a state law that says, "A person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment under this subchapter from a pregnant patient." She is being used as an incubator without her consent. [source] What do you make of this case? Is the hospital doing the right thing? What should be done?
because of that, then letting the fetus died by pulling life support of the dead mother, would then be equal to honor the mother's will to kill the child, which i think would be equivalent to a premeditated murder.
She never expressed a wish to kill the foetus. As Jacen said, one would think that she would have wanted the baby as she didn't abort. Which is why I think you can not compare this to a 'remeditated murder'.
so i propose that we let the fetus use the mother's body until it is safe enough to be surgically removed then pull out the life support system. now everybody's happy right?
I think that is pretty much what the doctors are doing, and which is not accepted by husband and parents. Besides, "happy" is maybe the wrong word especially for her family; she died after all.
Because one would think, that given that she is 14 (i think it was 14) weeks in, and hasn't aborted, she would want the baby to be born.
But the situation has changed, quite drastically, don't you think? Now her husband is the only parent alive to decide whether he wants to have the child or not. And quite obviously, he does not. Which doesn't mean that he woudln't love the child if it were born, but I assume he values the will of his wive higher.
but men should have no final say in whether or not an abortion can take place because we're men and because circular logic!
He doesn't have to keep the child⦠someone would surely adopt it in a heartbeat if it would just so happen to make it to term. If he doesn't want to pay for it, then I don't think he should have to since the hospital and its staff are required to keep the machines running.
I don't know that his not wanting to keep the child should be grounds for turning off the switch. If the woman is dead, then the woman is dead. The lump of flesh sitting on an incubator although able to excite emotion from the family is not that woman⦠it's a lump of flesh. She's been allowed to die because she is in fact dead. The lights are on but no body is home. The major questions are "did she know she was pregnant?" and did she express her desire to die instead of life support before or during the time she knew she was pregnant?"⦠and possibly "did she accommodate for being pregnant in her expressed choice to be taken off life support?"
If the child comes out mentally retarded due to the issues his mother experienced then this case will serve to help future cases like it. At this point in time, the developing human is the only one on life support because it's the only one with a life that's being supported⦠it just so happens to be indirectly through feeding and oxygenating another lump of cells. Yes⦠I know that technically life support is the act of just using the machines running but I'm looking at it from a different angle. It's not that big of a deal⦠she's dead and will be allowed to start rotting after the fetus comes to term. If she hadn't aborted it and if she knew about and wanted it, then maybe her decision to get off life support would've been changed had she had the chance to express it.
He doesn't have to keep the child⦠someone would surely adopt it in a heartbeat if it would just so happen to make it to term. If he doesn't want to pay for it, then I don't think he should have to since the hospital and its staff are required to keep the machines running.
See below..
I don't know that his not wanting to keep the child should be grounds for turning off the switch.
Oh, but it certainly isn't. I may not have expressed myself the right way before.. I'm convinced he would want to keep the child under normal conditions, i.e. if she was still alive. But I'm just as convinced that since he wants the machines to be turned off, he values the will of his wife not to vegetate higher than the life of their child.
So what I meant is.. the reason for him (and her parents) to ask the doctors to stop the machines is not likely to be a rejection of the child; rather, it's because of her will (the child is a very unfortunate "collateral damage", and I'm sure they're not happy with the decision). And that leads us to your next point..
The major questions are "did she know she was pregnant?" and did she express her desire to die instead of life support before or during the time she knew she was pregnant?"⦠and possibly "did she accommodate for being pregnant in her expressed choice to be taken off life support?"
If she hadn't aborted it and if she knew about and wanted it, then maybe her decision to get off life support would've been changed had she had the chance to express it.
It likely might have. I don't know if she thought about all that, I don't know if anyone knew this might happen; I certainly would have never thought of settling all these question while still alive. I guess nobody can answer this in her place. But I believe that if both her husband and her parents are so desperate to respect her will.. well, aren't they supposed to know her well?
--- I do think that in this case, the family's wish should be respected. However I have no idea how I would react in such a situation. I guess I would want the baby to be born, but maybe the pain of seeing the body of a beloved still 'alive' while there is no hope for her, would turn out to be quite strong.
I really don't have that much of an opinion. I just feel like some people appeal to emotion in order to demonize the other side when the alternative isn't all that terrible. I can't say for sure, but I feel like I would be able to come to terms with the situation if something like this were to happen to someone important in my life. Yeah, it would hurt⦠but I'm not going to say the other side would be wrong for doing what they're doing. They're not maintaining her in the hopes that she'll come back before the body wears out on its own and dies. There is no intent of keeping her body alive beyond the point that they need it to be. If I were myself to say that I'd rather have the plug pulled than to have my brain dead body subjected to life maintaining machines and for whatever reason mine is the only match for a marrow transplant that needs to happen to keep someone a life, then I think I might be fine with the thought that my body might be kept alive against my request just to save someone else or to give someone else a second chance. Granted, I'm probably the only person in the world who wouldn't care given this or other such similar scenarios, but if given a rational well meaning reason I think I would be fine with someone going against my wishes in order to do something for a decent cause. Idk about the whole making money off of my body parts without my consent like they did with Henrietta Lax, but that's a slightly different story. I can only choose to approach a vague scenario in the way that I'd be ok with people approaching it if I were the victim or person in question. Bc⦠after all, it's not the brain dead person that's going to lose sleep at night over whether or not the choice they made was the right one.
I'm personally not too sure what I'd do⦠it sounds like I am, but I'm not.
i agree with you sonatavarius, if i were the woman, then i would have no prob if someone would use parts of my body to keep someone alive, even if i have asked my "wife" ( i don't have one yet ) to just pull the plug and let me plunge into the deep abyss. but so, if the husband so insisting on letting a dying woman (his wife) died, then surely he has a good reason, because that is a good husband that respects his wife even though no one can supervise it. i just thought that maybe we don't have to kill the baby.
i agree with you sonatavarius, if i were the woman, then i would have no prob if someone would use parts of my body to keep someone alive
Indeed. You would also have no problem with being ground up and fed to zoo animals and/or homeless people. You seem to be neglecting the fact that your premise requires you to have absolutely no thoughts, opinions, or ideas of what is going on. We would have to conclude that someone else is falsely representing you and imposing their opinion upon you, which is what this whole discussion is about.
I would also like to address that there is no dying woman and there is no baby. The woman has died. The fetus has never lived, legally or experientially. The woman's will was that she (or, by extention, her body) not be kept on life support. If this were conditional on her not being pregnant, we could conclude that the birth of what would/will be her child was in accordance with her wishes, but this is not the case.
Your definition of life and the legal definition of life and whether or not you find inherent value in anything of that sort might be at odds with mine. You can define baby however you want, but know that there are both scientific AND layman definitions. To argue the scientific definition over the layman to show that there is no baby does nothing to refute the layman's position. The layman's position was never grounded in scientific life stages. It's a position that states that there is either sentient life there, the chance to reclaim sentient life, or the chance to gain it for the first time. The layman vernacular isn't as such, but that is the general gist of what I believe most of them to be trying to get across.
I have a problem with the logic behind the decisions made by the attorney and judge mentioned. I'm sure there have been plenty of emergency c sections that have caused many a baby to be untimely ripped fromst his deceased mother's womb. You need only be roughly 24 weeks into gestation to have a chance at surviving outside of the womb. Had this BABY in question made it to 24 weeks before his mother dropped dead would you have let it die (assuming you were well within the time frame of keeping the baby out of hypoxic brain damage) with the mother like the attorney's words would lead you to believe she would? Or would you rip it out to save it? If it needed to bake but 7 days more would it be ok then to maintain her for a while longer?
I'd rather not lead bums to cannibalism, b/c it's often harmful to the cannibal's health⦠unless we're going to teach the bums to hunt and eat each other. I know there are people that need help, but after having experienced life for a while and being related to a few of them I'd rather not give "HAND"outs to anyone. Most of the ones I know have had their chances at life given to them over and over again but they still refuse to do anything with it. I'll help give them a chance to rip out of their own cocoon, but they've got to be the one to do it⦠same with BABIES.
I'd rather them say that the mother is dead and the baby is dead or is so grossly screwed up from the process that it won't survive outside of the uterus so flip the switch.
The law says not to flip off the switch for pregnant women. That goes directly against the apparent right to choose. Surely there was a reason for this law other than to just randomly specify pregnant women. In combination with the conceived ~46 chromosome zygote (the ~ tilda thingy means approximately so don't go spouting out that "whut abbot deems trisomy 21s??"and older being a human being with their law it seems quite obvious that the law was meant to protect the human⦠by law that blob is in fact human!⦠inside the uterus. Until that law is found unconstitutional and it's nullification is enforced the hospital was just as right as you are. Unless of course you want to declare an objective "right and wrong" that are just inherent in the universe and that you are the right and that they are that wrong and are able to prove thatâ¦
I wonder if the hospital actually said "non viable" in the court of if that's just a paraphrased quote from them saying it's potentially jacked up. Extrapolating off of but a word or even up to just a sentence or two seems like a really poor way to conduct the law. It almost seems that the judge made the decision that was made solely on the fact that the constitutional issue wouldn't have to be discussed. â¦assuming that the depicted scenario in the article is in fact the truth of what has happened.
The layman's position was never grounded in scientific life stages. It's a position that states that there is either sentient life there, the chance to reclaim sentient life, or the chance to gain it for the first time
And here we see the other problem. What the layman neglects to realize is that by his definition, preventing birth at any stage has the same result. Abortion? Yup. Birth control? That too. Physical contraception? Just a step away from mass infanticide. In the English language, however, a fetus is not yet born and a baby is already born.
I'd rather not lead bums to cannibalism, b/c it's often harmful to the cannibal's healthâ¦
Seeing as you are not currently deceased, this does not surprise me.
It's possible that you don't even know what the legal definition of "living" is, friend. â¦considering each state is different you might want to look into Texas :-).
No. Gangrenous putrescence is living. The tissue cultured for skin grafts is living and human. Neither have human rights, however.
I wonder if the hospital actually said "non viable" in the court of if that's just a paraphrased quote from them saying it's potentially jacked up. Extrapolating off of but a word or even up to just a sentence or two seems like a really poor way to conduct the law.
According to the report: "She was 14 weeks pregnant at the time." This is about half the age at which a fetus is deemed viable, so it really doesn't matter.
Regarding the fetus (yes, "fetus", as per biological definition, regardless of your protests of "BABY! BABY!", lletting the woman's body die is analogous to an abortion. As of yet, Roe v. Wade has not been overturned; therefore, aborting the fetus would be fully legal, in Texas, as well as elsewhere.
The doctors have taken an oath that says "above all, do no harm." The woman is dead, so the doctors cannot really harm her. This only leaves the fetus, which shouldn't be allowed to die.
The doctors have taken an oath that says "above all, do no harm." The woman is dead, so the doctors cannot really harm her. This only leaves the fetus, which shouldn't be allowed to die.
Again, if this were a case of someone needing an organ, would the hospital be allowed to harvest without consent?
Again, if this were a case of someone needing an organ, would the hospital be allowed to harvest without consent?
In our country, for the first year I think we had enough, if not too much, donated blood. We don't need to rely on vegetative bodies for blood.
It's different with organs. As probably everywhere we had patients die waiting for an organ. There have been discussions about changing the organ donor system; currently you have to give your agreement while alive, but others wanted to change to a default system where organs could be harvested from anyone, except if the person refused while alive (so basically the opposite). I don't know the reasons right now but it didn't pass.
Honestly, I think that it would save a lot of lives if organs could be taken from any corpse. But I understand that people want to decide on that themselves. And I'm convinced we can achieve sufficient organ supply without having to force everybody; but we do need to try and convince as many people as possible to get an organ donor pass. Many people haven't thought about it, haven't decided on it. Maybe asking people by default, and make them decide, could get us more organs already (possibly when reaching adulthood, some kind of formulary or questionary, I don't know..)
others wanted to change to a default system where organs could be harvested from anyone, except if the person refused while alive (so basically the opposite).
I really doubt anything like this would pass in the US because consent is something to be given, not assumed.
well then it ends our discussion, since it's done anyway
WWII was done a long time ago. Does that mean we can't talk about it?
